Can we boost hippocampal activity just by thinking the right thoughts? ​Out now in @currentbiology.bsky.social , we show that contingent feedback helps refine & guide effective mental strategies 📈 ​Congrats to @s-vandelangenberg.bsky.social, @guygu44.bsky.social & team! ​📃 doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

Does knowing that distractions are coming change how we use working memory? In two EEG experiments, anticipating interference did not change how strongly previously learned information was reactivated in working memory. doi.org/10.1162/JOCN...

First human evolution lecture done and uploaded. I will put them all in the same playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Introduction to Human Evolution - YouTube

Lectures for the human evolution survey course offered at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

youtube.com

Richard McElreath 🐈‍⬛@rmcelreath.bsky.social · 2w ago

I haven't taught a survey course in human evolution in the last decade, but starting next week (!!) I will try again. I plan to record the lectures. But the lab practicals can't be shared online, unfortunately. Currently deciding how much math I can/should make the students do

Do the contents of visual #WorkingMemory deteriorate more quickly when more items are being remembered? Seems a straightforward question but we had to bring together 13 studies and >120,000 trials to get definitive answers... doi.org/10.1037/rev0... @ivntmc.bsky.social

We’re back with episode 2 of “A Conversation with a Future Luminary”! Jenna talks with UMass Boston graduate students, @ckoolh.bsky.social and @quinnpham.bsky.social about time management, working memory, episodic future thinking, collecting data in museums, and much more! itsinnate.fireside.fm/45

A conversation with future luminaries #2: Candice Koolhaas and Quinn Pham

itsinnate.fireside.fm

@quinnpham.bsky.social and I were on the It’s Innate podcast! Thank you @jennadistefano.bsky.social @jinjingjenny1.bsky.social @deontbenton.bsky.social for the opportunity!!! It was so much fun to chat about our PhD projects! open.spotify.com/episode/4l1w...

Episode 45: A conversation with future luminaries #2: Candice Koolhaas and Quinn Pham

The It's Innate! Podcast · Episode

open.spotify.com

Thanks, but actually my favorite line didn't make it to the piece. Does Odysseus feel guilty about the Trojan war? Lots of discourse on this question even though he doesn't exist! Is he conscious? AI agents are fictive characters abstracted from text - like Odysseus.

SJ Brison@brison.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Love the quote from Alison Gopnik: “We don’t know if toasters are conscious or not,” Dr. Gopnik said. “But no one is asking about that in the pages of The New York Times.”

🌈 New preprint! With Sage, Melissa, and Kia (@dynacog-lab.bsky.social, @scenegrammarlab.bsky.social, @kianobre.bsky.social), we explore how attention is divided across external perception and internal working memory - revealing a dynamic trade-off between these two domains. doi.org/10.64898/202...

bioRxiv Neuroscience@biorxiv-neursci.bsky.social · 3mo ago

Dynamic prioritisation of attention when external and internal demands compete https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.06.743163v1

How good are you at inferring the correlation of a set of data points? Check out Daniel @lakens.bsky.social’s game (part of his “Improving your statistical inferences” book) and test (and hone!) your skill: buff.ly/hcOmPOU

So excited to share a new publication! Here, my advisors @zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social @erikblaser.bsky.social and I discuss the theoretical model underlying our recent projects on WM use across the lifespan, and we suggest a more ethological approach to studying WM. www.sciencedirect.com/science/chap...

What is working memory for? An ethological approach to working memory in children and adults

Typical visual working memory tasks involve many trials of rapid presentations of simple stimuli to be remembered across short delays. This is rarely …

sciencedirect.com

Open Mind, the free OA competitor to Cognition (El$evier) founded by Richard Aslin, has nearly caught up to it impact-factor-wise Submit your best work! It's a great journal with fast and constructive review, a great ed board, and lots of cool work Open Mind is the future of cogsci journals!

—— Open Mind is MIT Press’s Diamond Open Access Cognitive Science journal. We now have our first Impact Factor: 2.9 as of June 2026 Submit your papers to Open Mind direct.mit.edu/opmi

Congratulations, Melissa Kibbe (@levelsof.bsky.social), on winning the Society for Philosophy and Psychology’s 2026 Stanton Prize and, more generally, for your rich research program demonstrating the origins of abstract, generative thought in human infants.

Have you thought of using unchained pupillometry to infer effort/arousal with _uncontrolled_ visual stimulation? Sounds crazy? @yuqingc.bsky.social shows that convolutional modeling of pupil responses with gaze-contingent luminance changes finally allows just that! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Update: my amazing RA Zane Mourad is no longer job hunting as he will be starting this summer as lab manager at the Infant Cognition Lab at UC Davis!! 🎉 he gifted the grad students these beautiful shot glasses with a pic from our CDS trip 🥲 simultaneously thrilled but also missing him already!

Candice Koolhaas@ckoolh.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Is anyone looking for a full-time RA starting in the summer who has an awesome personality, great work ethic, and experience with eye-tracking and cognitive development research? 🙂

🎊New Lab Alert! I'll be starting at the 🧡University of Texas at Austin🧡 this August! More info to come. thesonglab.github.io I send my deep gratitude to my mentors, Monica @monicarosenb.bsky.social, YC @ycleong.bsky.social, ShiNung @shinung.bsky.social & Zach @zreagh.bsky.social, for everything.

Excited to share our new paper on how distraction affects memory retrieval. Using a continuous report paradigm, we show that distraction reduces whether memories are accessed but not how precisely they are represented. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Arrived to Florida a bit before VSS and enjoying a classic on the hotel balcony 😎

Psych-DS is spellcheck for your datasets, and it has an R package now! Available in beta now, made by the excellent Brian Leonard, instructions here: psych-ds.github.io/psychds-r/

New preprint! What happens in the brain when people offload memories into external reminders? Using fMRI decoding, we found that the corresponding neural trace fades until it becomes statistically absent. osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵...

⚠️New review on video games for cognitive citizen science! "From Players to Participants: Citizen Science and Video Games to Understand Cognition" arxiv.org/abs/2604.24321

After hundreds of studies on the retro-cue effect in working memory, we thought that we understood what caused it. Not quite - check out our new paper: psycnet.apa.org/record/2027-...

Is anyone looking for a full-time RA starting in the summer who has an awesome personality, great work ethic, and experience with eye-tracking and cognitive development research? 🙂

I would have preferred to have the "draw the rest of the owl" meme on the cover, but this will do. Seems like it is on schedule, and we'll leave some typos so you know we didn't write it with AI.

Excited for #CDS2026 in Montreal! Check out our lab's posters on Friday and Saturday!

So grateful to have my first first-author publication out in Developmental Science! Here we (@zsuzsakaldy.bsky.social @erikblaser.bsky.social) used our Shopping Game to ask whether kids use all of their memory capacity if they don't have to (they don't! 🤭) onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

How Much Do You Remember When It's up to You? Measuring Memory Use Without Response Bias in Young Children

Outside the laboratory, people tend not to push working memory to its limits. Instead, we tend to capitalize on stable, external resources (e.g., assembly diagrams or shopping lists) in a dynamic, c...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

New research from University of Waterloo Psychology researchers Adrian B. Safati (PhD student) and Dr. Daniel Smilek shows that simply expecting to think about our own thinking can actively influence how we regulate attention. Check it out: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

The Effects of Anticipating Metacognitive Judgments about Mind-Wandering - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

Across two experiments (N = 121, 121) we examined whether the anticipation of metacognitive judgments in the form of experience sampling probes of mind-wandering influenced attentional engagement. Par...

link.springer.com

🚨 New #Review #Preprint 🚨 Veera Ruuskanen proposes a new, concrete framework to understand how and why pupil size 👁️, neural activity 🧠, and behavior 💃 interact. doi.org/10.31234/osf... #psychology #neuroscience #pupillometry #perception

Can We Process Information Without Encoding It into Working Memory? Our findings with @gidon-frischkorn.bsky.social and @koberauer.bsky.social suggest that processing entails encoding. Task-irrelevant information enters working memory during processing, impairing memory for relevant information.

Looking for your next weekend stats read?! @cribbie.bsky.social and I have written a tutorial on negligible effect/equivalence testing! link.growkudos.com/1ex872pua68

How Small Is Small Enough? Understanding Negligible Effects

Researchers often ask questions about whether an effect is small enough to be considered unimportant. For example, is the difference in productivity between working at home and working in the office n...

link.growkudos.com

Neuroscientist @clionamurray.com knows the power of community. Murray explains how @blackinneuro.bsky.social expanded from its humble beginnings as a Slack channel to connect Black neuroscientists across the diaspora. By @alainaglevine.bsky.social #neuroskyence